Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 gets thumbs up from SAP, Amazon

Red Hat has reached two significant milestones in its effort to establish its latest enterprise Linux as the ideal platform for cloud computing and running mission critical applications.

On Tuesday, the leading Linux provider will announce that its 10-month-old Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been certified by SAP.

That means both companies will provide support for the leading mission critical business application on RHEL 6, considered essential by enterprises before deployment is possible.

Next. Red Hat also announced support for SAP solutions running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This will allow SAP customers to use Red Hat Cloud Access and Red Hat's hourly on-demand images in all Amazon EC2 regions.

There are currently more than 5,000 qualified applications running on RHEL 6 and Red Hat has established several cloud partnerships as part of its cloud partner program.

But getting endorsements from both of these major players is very significant in the lifecycle of RHEL 6, said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's Platforms Business Unit.

Customers are using the cloud today mainly for test and development and business intelligence applications but application deployment on both on-premise and cloud platforms is evolving rapidly, he noted.

Gus Robertson, vice president of Business Development at Red Hat, said RHEL 6 is ready for many customers who are looking to evolve from older platforms to new IT architectures.

Customers "are trying to modernize their infrastructure from legacy Unix to architectures that are cloud ready," Robertson said.